Special Forces are very powerful compared to normal troops, and they will likely, more often than not, successfully complete any mission you give them. The only problem with them is that you can’t have a lot of divisions with them.
There is a limit to how many Special Forces, such as Marines and Mountaineers, you can have on the field based on the number of troops you already have deployed.
Recommended Read: How to Change Country in Hearts of Iron 4
This cap can be very annoying, as some plates don’t even know where to look to see what their Special Forces cap is.
We have discovered a way to let you build as many Special Forces as you want by artificially increasing the Special Forces cap to a huge number in HOI4. Continue reading to learn how to do it yourself.
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How the Special Forces Cap Works
There are three battalions that the game considers Special Forces:
- Marines
- Paratroopers
- Mountaineers
These troops are special since they can fulfill tasks no other troops can and get huge advantages in horrible circumstances.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t want to allow you to make an army made out of only Special Forces.
HOI4 added a mechanic that will keep players in check by capping the number of Special Forces you can have, based on your total deployed troops.
You can check this cap by pressing O on your keyboard or by pressing the Army button right under the date and game speed.
This will open the Divisions menu, where you can see all of your troops. In the upper part of the menu, players can see how many divisions they have, how many battalions these divisions have, and the Special Forces cap.
The Special Forces cap will always be a minimum of 24, meaning that you can only have 24 Special Forces battalions on the field at the same time.
The actual number of Special Forces battalions that you can have in HOI4 is 5% of your total regular battalions.
If you didn’t know this, battalions are the squads that form a division. When you create a division, the troops that you add to it are battalions.
Luckily, we’ve discovered a way to bypass the Special Forces cap and allow you to make as many of them as you want.
How to Instantly Increase the Special Forces Cap in HOI4
Normally, to increase your Special Forces cap in HOI4, you would just have to build more troops and divisions. That will naturally increase your battalion numbers, increasing the Special Forces cap as well.
However, there is an exploitative way you can instantly increase your Special Forces cap and allow you to make as many Special Forces as you want.
Here is what you need to do to increase your Special Forces cap instantly in HOI4:
- Go to the Recruit & Deploy menu and Edit a template. Preferably a weak cavalry one.
- Remove most of the battalions and make the division only have one battalion (one troop on a square) and Save.
- Select to Train that division and then Shift + Click on the Add Unit button as many times as possible. We do this to train around 100 divisions.
- Deploy as many divisions as you can and try to reach something close to 100 divisions.
- Meanwhile, create another division template that has 50 combat width. This means that you need to fill all of the squares with battalions. This will likely cost a lot of Army Experience, so make sure to employ a Chief of Army.
- Once you’ve deployed as many weak, one-battalion divisions as you can, select them and press the Change Division button in the upper right corner (two green arrows pointing opposite directions), and select the new, 50-width divisions.
Now, if you opened the Divisions menu, you would see that you have thousands of battalions, and your Special Forces cap should be somewhere over 100.
This means that you’ve increased the Special Forces cap to 100 in HOI4 without actually making any real troops.
It doesn’t matter that your new divisions have no equipment since the developers didn’t think players would play the game like this.
What to Do Next
Now that you have around 100 underequipped divisions, you just have to do a quick calculation to see how many Special Forces divisions you can actually get.
For example, if you have a Mountaineer division that you wanted to build that has 6 Mountaineer battalions, then you need to see how many of them you can make under the limit.
If your limit were 100, and you have a Mountaineer division with 6 battalions, then you just need to divide 100 by 6 to see how many divisions you can get (16).
Once you know how many divisions you can get, select that number of divisions from your huge, useless army and change them into Mountaineers.
Then, delete the rest of the army to get your Manpower and equipment back, and you now have a huge army of Special Forces that is grossly over the cap.
The problem is that you can only do this once, so make sure to make the best Special Forces division before you try this out, as you can’t add new Special Forces battalions to the template later.
The game will just say that you would go over the Special Forces cap.
You probably also won’t be able to make any new Special Forces in the near future, so make sure you get a variety of them.
Get both Mountaineers and Marines, maybe even some Paratroopers. Just make sure you prepare a huge amount of Army Experience before you try this exploit.
That’s everything you need to know about how to increase the Special Forces cap in Hearts of Iron 4!
Have any input or suggestions for this guide? Let us know in the comment section below.
